Doug Anderson: An Ars Poetica

In the dark of the jeweled cities, below the mirror

buildings, in the wind that funnels up the street canyons

blowing hats off and women’s hair sideways

poets are passing a small flame from one pair

of cupped hands to another.

In the rusting skeletons of elevated tracks,

in the subway among the skittering rats

that little green light way down in the tunnel

is a poem being lit from a candy wrapper.

Below the steam grates down in the gulping

peristalsis of the big pipes, an eye opens

and in the iris’s pulsing anemone, a poem rises,

wends its way through electrobabble and caresses

even the shouts of rage and the porno-voiced

recordings in the stores saying gimme gimme

and buy that thing you can’t even name

but has already got its hand down your pants.

In the airports, hearts light neon

in the walk through scanners

and slither out of the rubber gloved hands

of the terror probers diddling our secrets.

In the steerage of the main cabin the miserable

with their knees crushed against the seat back

nod out until the hand of the flight attendant,

as if out of a cloud, hands them a drink

in which gold whiskey swirl swims the fetal poem.

—

copyright 2015 Doug Anderson